Tag Archives: New Wolsy Theatre Ipswich

reviewed at the Mercury Theatre, Colchester on 8 February

Post Traumatic Stress is a fact of both military and civilian life. The former also impinges on the latter.

Family, friends, employers and the medical profession all attempt to deal with a person whose life has been blistered by experiences they can scarcely understand and which are outside (for the most part) their personal acquaintance.

Vamos Theatre under its founder-director Rachael Savage specialises in full-mask mime. As in classic Greek theatre, the mask both hides the identity of the actor and allows each audience member to make of the character portrayed what he or she will.

Mime makes us concentrate – there are no words to distract from what we are seeing. This full-length production does have sound, created and mixed by Janie Armour and Adrian Northover. Carl Davies’ sets and costumes with Mark Parry’s projections and Russell Dean’s masks draw it all together.

The story is simple enough. Two young men Ryan (James Greaves) and Jimmy (Sean Kempton) join the Army in 2009. Ryan’s mother (Angela Laverick) and young sister Katie (Joanna Holden) see them off on this life-changing adventure.

It takes them to Afghanistan, completely alien in culture, faith and politics to th men of their platoon. Khatera (Holden) is a young village girl, with much the same teasing attitude to Ryan as his kid sister back at home.

Then something happens in the village. Something so traumatic for Ryan that he sins his life out of all control. Discharged, he can’t settle to a job, brushes his mother and sister aside and sinks so deep into depression that the pills prescribed by an overworked doctor seem to offer the simplest way out.

Does he take it? That you have to find out for yourself. It’s important to remember that, though the theme is serious, the staging has its lighter-hearted moments. Camaraderie is understandably a support mechanism.

Most evenings show us British and Allied troops coping with strange places and even stranger customs. Atrocities do occur; it’s difficult for the lay person to place these in true context.

At the curtain call, the cast take off their masks to reveal their own faces. It is a strength of Savage’s meticulously researched production that we feel we know the person behind the mask more completely than the performer when bare-faced.

Five star rating.

A Brave Face is at the Mercury Theatre, Colchester also on 9 February. The national and international tour until 30 May includes the New Wolsey Theatre, Ipswich ( 23 February), the Theatre Royal Bury St Edmunds (23 April), Hertford Theatre (1 May), the Mumford Theatre, Cambridge (2 May), the Civic Theatre, Chelmsford (5 May), Stantonbury Theatre, Milton Keynes (11 May) and the Rhodes Arts Centre, Bishop’s Stortford (12 May).

This year’s Pulse Festival curated by China Plate made a fascinating start with two one-person shows. Kieran Hodgson’s Maestro takes a wry look at a would-be composer (idol is Mahler, bête noire Rachmaninoff), his social and bi-sexual feelings and fumblings and the whole frustrating business of transforming from child to adult through teenage.

In theory, we should itch to give him a good shaking and tell him to take a grip of reality. In practice, we’ve all built sun-drenched sand castles out of wisful yearnings, tentative romances and might-have-been career fantasies – only to see them washed away by the rising tide of life as it is. Callum, Lucy, Ed, Cécile and Anthony as they float in and out of Kieran’s life (so far) are brought to our notice as though they peopled the stage with him.

All the Things I Lied About by Kate Bonna as altogether more acerbic. As she points out, we live in a post-truth world (though I suspect that it was ever so) where lies are the fuel for everyday intercourse in person or through electronic transmission. It’s another autobiographical show which begins with politics, Brexit and Trump and segues into her parents’ marriage, its breakdown and her gradual realisation of the truth.

Fake news is, of course, not a new phenomenon. Perhaps we asociate it in particular with politicians, but it also can be purely personal. As Bonna demonstrates how multifaceted truth can be – with the aid of audience participation and some interesting lighting effects – her wariness about total emotional commitment is laid bare before us.

Both shows were British Sign Language interpreted. The anonymous interpreter at one side of the stage deserves a festival award in her own right. Not only did she echo evry word of Bonna, she also managed to keep up with Hodgson’s ad-libs – and did it all with an air of actual enjoyment. Top marks.

Four-star rating.
The Pulse 2017 Festival continues in Ipswich until 10 June at the New Wolsey Theatre, the New Wolsey Studio, the High Street Exhibition Gallery and DanceEast’s Jerwood Dancehouse.